[6][7][8][9][10] In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, she was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to poetry.
[12] Her father, Henry George Gilbert, was born 1881 in Cust, Canterbury, into a farming family.
In his youth, having left primary school and home, he worked his way around the world, visiting relatives in Hampshire, England.
He was educated as a late entrant at Otago University, completing the work for an MA about 1914, but was never awarded the degree as he had not matriculated.
Responding to an invitation to train as a Presbyterian minister (although an Anglican by upbringing) he spent four years at Knox College.
A gifted musician, she became a music teacher, and was official accompanist for visiting artists in Dunedin.
Ruth Gilbert married John Bennett Mackay, a physician specialising in chest diseases.
Ruth travelled for a year with her family to England and France in 1953, when John received his MRCP degree.
In 1975-7 she made a trip on her own to New York City to visit her son Michael who was working as a physician there.
Other uncollected jeux d'esprit exist in letters held at the Alexander Turnbull Library and in private hands.
Fairburn, J. H. E. Schroder, Jonathan Bennett, Robert Chapman, Celia and Louis Johnson, Willow Macky, Lorna and Monte Holcroft, Professor Ian Gordon, Professor Joan Stevens (an acquaintance from school days at Hamilton), Margaret J. O'Donnell (Britain), Niel Wright, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Jean and James Munro Bertram, Frank McKay, Helen Shaw, Denis Glover, Lauris Edmond, Ralph Park, Riemke Ensing, Meg and Alistair Campbell, Sam Hunt, Jack Ross, Jan Kemp, Peter Smart, Robin Dudding, Bill Wieben, Ian Wedde, Harvey McQueen, Derek Bolt, C. K. Stead, Michele Leggott, Jenny Bornholdt, Terry Locke, Mary Barnard (Oregon), Dr Michael O'Leary, Mark Pirie, Denis Welsh, Cameron La Follette (Oregon), Ian Lancashire (Toronto), her commercial publishers A.H. and A.W.
[25] Ruth Gilbert's earliest verse was written about 1926; she was first published in the Hamilton High School magazine in the 1930s, but copies have yet to be found.
Interviewed in 1991, Ruth Gilbert said that as a child of the manse her earliest influences came from hymns and the Bible.
"My father had a study which had books from floor to ceiling and, provided I had clean hands, I was allowed to read what I liked."
An early favourite was Thomas Wyatt and later she enjoyed Yeats, Graves and many of the French poets.
But since 1966 balanced, appreciative and authoritative reviews and interviews have appeared by James Bertram, Heather McPherson, Lauris Edmond, Derek Bolt, Deirdre Mackay and others.
[30] Ruth Gilbert always shows as a traditionalist poet who moves freely and comfortably within formalism, notably lyrical and melodious, usually dramatic and narrative, rarely explicitly confessional.
In her brief autobiographical comments, Ruth Gilbert makes it clear that from earliest childhood she was aware of religion and nature, and religious material and the natural world are a staple throughout her poetry, so overwhelmingly that people may read and see her as a devout Christian.
All her use of religious material moves in the same direction, even for some readers to the point of comic parody.
A comic poem called "Aged Eighty Four", published in 1944, was inspired by the experience of nursing her mother while she was dying of cancer.
She knows the reality of human life as thoroughly as anybody, but she holds and expresses confidently that the natural world is a positive good.
In her 1970 study of contemporary poets, Professor Joan Stevens places Ruth Gilbert in the Georgian tradition.
"The poems are quiet, lyric, occasional, sometimes slight, about music and biblical stories and places – NY, Samoa, England.
Her references are often biblical, as in the anthologised "Leah", or classical, as in the extensive set of short poems on Sappho themes written after she learnt Greek at the age of 75 (Breathings, 1992).
"[34] In 1985 Niel Wright published the only book-length survey of Ruth Gilbert's poetry in print to that date.
[36] He has also written a book-length discussion of the cultural milieu of the leading literary editors 1922–1949 Marris and Schroder and their favourite poets Ruth Gilbert, Eileen Duggan and Robin Hyde.
Celebrating Ruth Gilbert and the Triumph of Kiwi Georgianism: An Essay in the Literary History of Aoteaoa.
Sketch Profile of Ruth Gilbert with Full Commentary Quoting Various Authors: A Compilation.